My school email account is reminding me that quite soon I need to refocus my attention one more semester on academic issues. I’m looking tonight at two scholarly articles – both potentially important to a wide audience if the audience had the skills, patience, and discipline to carefully read them in their entirety – or if someone carefully translated and condensed them without misleading through oversimplification. I continue to monitor research investigating treatments for individuals with mild cognitive impairment.
A January 2019 article from The Gerontologist “Nonimmersive Brain Gaming for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment: A Scoping Review” caught my eye. The authors are careful to point out that though most of the 17 studies examined found that electronic brain gaming interventions led to improvements in one or more cognitive outcomes, most were pilot/feasibility studies lacking appropriate active controls matched for expectations, novelty, engagement and motivation.
A second, quite well-done, 2019 study “Lifestyle and neurocognition in older adults with cognitive impairments” published in Neurology epitomizes excellence in design. I’ll probably introduce it to my Statistics and Experimental Design course on Day 1 both for its experimental design, the thoughfulness of the researchers in designing the study, and how they may have over-stated their results. It is too bad that I must wait three years before they are willing to share the raw data!
